THE

THE
IN
PHOBIC AND THE EROTIC:
POLITICS
OF SEXUALITIES
CONTEMPORARY
INDIA
EDTTED BY BRtND4 BosE AND
SU BHABRATA BHATTACHARYYA
90 SIBAII BANDYOPADHYAY
173 Freud,
'Essay No. I: The Sexual Aberrations', n Tltree Essys, p' 54'
t74Ibid., pp. 554.
175I6id., p. 56.
176 Richards,
'Editor Note', in Freud, 'Essay No' I: The Sexual
Aberrations', in Three Essays, p. 55-
t77 rbid.
l78McCormick,
'General Introduction, in McCormick
(ed'), Secret
Sexualities, p. l.
179 For a detailed explication of the concept of the proxirnate, see
Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence'
180 Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p.29-
lgl Basu,'Grounds of restriction of *re freedom of speech and expressiori, p.
98.
182 Sigmund Freud,
'Fourth Chapter: Childhood Memories and Screen
Meories', in The Psychopathologlt of Eueryday Life, The Penguin Freud
Library, (Harmondsworth: 1991), vor-. 5' p- 83.
183 Ibid., p. 84.
184 Ibid.
185 lbid.
186 Vinayak Damodar Savarkat Hinduna: V(/ho Is a Hindu?
(New Delhi:
rgs9), p. 83.
187 Ibid., p. 115.
188 Ibid., p. ll6.
1gg For a scholarly supporr of Advanit view that the Gita pre-dates
Buddhism, see Surendranath Dasgupta,
'The Philosophy of the
p. 551).
190 Robert Dreyfuss,
'The Holy \ar on Gays', in The Rolling Stone, 808
(18 March 1999):38.
191 Ibid.:3841.
-T-
A CASE OF RADICAT KINSHIP: EDWARD CARPENTER
AND
THE POLITICS
OF ANTI-COLONIAL
SEXUL OISSIDENCE
Leela Gandhi
In the otherwise monumenral
edited by Claude Summers, the
enrry on South Asia is attributed
tion. The voluminous
liteature o
told, is consistently'sirent
on the subject of homosexualiry
and this ret-
icence, in rurn,
erhaps
eflects the
ienerally
.orrr.*"tir..
_r., .f ,n.
people'.t \here, once, rhe ,edoubt"bl.
Katherine fr.l"y" gf."".i n._
irregularities
severely in need oflivilizational
ts the reverse: a narion fraught by repression
omosexual refugees to seek amnesty in other,
cultures: '.
either the Unitej Stares or
Britain---countries
that have wen estabrished
gay and,l.rbi-
.o--,r.ri
ues wr
r e gteater
sexuil
out'; a
rs to
o
turalh
ofacul-
.
According to Rurh vanira and Sareem Kidwai, editors of the recent
anthology, Same-Sex Loue in India, ,
a schisrl between homosexuariry
jT:l
r";t
nourish the hysterical and homop
rvative lobbies
at home, eager ro p..pet.r"t.
.the
ve is a disease
imported into India from.the
\est'.3 Defying both the ,.tot".ty
"rra
unscholarly
consensus on this subject, Vanira and Kidwai insist that the
rich vein of same-sex desire_ in Sourh Asia, journeying
from the ancient
Sanskrit.epics,
through medieva-l
puanic
.rrr"tirr., and Urdu poetr is
eventuaJly
frozen not from wirhin India but rather, f.o_ i,ho.r.,
through peculiarly English sexual an
proscriptions
introduced
inro India
foregrounding
repression rather than
India, these editors invire us ro re
enduring anti-sodomy
law introduce
92 LEELA GANDHI
of the Penal Code. Likewise, British (homo)sexual anxieties are amply
reflected in the Purity campaigns of the 1880s ad 1890s which resulted
in the growing public condemnation and legal curtailmenr of homosex-
uality at home and abroad in the colonized world.a
This essay concurs with the historical assumptions which inform the
work of scholars like Vanita and Kidwai and argues that any coherent
understanding of homoerotic articulation and disarticulation in post-
colonial India requires that we return, once again, to the ,..rr. ol th.
colonial encounter. In the main, my argument is this: if the Empire intro-
duced a virulent strain of homosexual anxiety/homophobia at home and
abroad in the colonies, it also generated, at its margins, a counteractive
form of dissident or radicd homo/bisexual. reasoning which became the
agent, on both sides of the colonial divide, of wide-ranging social, polit-
ical and epistemological transformations. To make this case I take my
theoretical cue from Monique \ittigt thesis in The Strait Mind
(1992), wherein she postuiates heterosexualiry as ar institution-indeed,
as the prevailing social e-fqunded on the ineluctable categories
of sex.5 Framed in these terms, homosexual desire/identity is inescapably
politicized in and as an existential obligation to break with the prevailing
social contract by destroying the sociological reality ofthe sexes.6
Two features of
'STittigt
thesis require closer attention. First, she is at
one with the wider tradition of French feminist philosophy in conceiving
of heteronormativiry principall as a closed masculine economy where
'femaleness' (or effeminaT) is, variousl effaced, repressed, banished
from modes of producion and signification.T Second, by imagining
homosexuality as a third position outside the binary of sex, indeed, out-
side of the social contract itself,
'S(/ittig
secures a powerfly utopian
provenance for the activity of homosexual identification.s Seeking the
availabilicy of a
'Sittig-type
homosexual utopianism in post/colonial
India, this essay proposes that both the Empire and its antagonist, the
anti-colonial nation, need to be recognized as profoundly heteronorma-
tive projects which founded their competing authorities on the categories
of sex, viz., on a closed masculine signifring economy. In recent years, as
a range ofscholas have turned their attention to the role played by gen-
der in determining the relations beween colonizer and colonized, it is
generally understood that if late-Vctorian culture increasingly carne to
privilege masculinity as the repository of colonial authority, it simultane-
ously insisted upon the contrasting'effeminacy' of colonized Indian men
as an alibi for conquest ad domination.e However, even though the
effeminate East was often identified within colonial discourse as a
homosexual or
'sotadic
zone', the imperial project itself, circumscribed as
it was by the axious prerogatives of masculinity, was not homoerotic (as
RADICAL KINSHIP 93
saa suleri argues) s^o much as it was aggressivery homophobic. In these
terms, then, the oft-cited anti_colonian:
self_
r*rm in the image of the aggressor, by
mas_
culinity, ca be said to herald th. orrr.t
rma_
tivity-tragically
collaborationist
ad fra
internalized homophobia,
or fear, in o
then, a case
and ati-cl
lowing: that
holds consent to the nationalist social contract may, if it exists, arso be
shown to emerge out of an earrier culture of cororral homosexual dissi-
dence which withheld consenr, in this insrance, to the imperialist social
contract? It is in this spirit of questioning that I will consider the caeer
of Edwad Carpenter (lB4/+-1929),
tlre-
tish socialist,
homosexual-
refi:sal of the
binaries and hierachies.
ge of contingent and prwailing
PREAMBLE
In his early prose poem' Torlards Demoaacy (rgg3),
the rate rgth-centuy
socialist, animal rights activist, prison ,.forrrr., and homosexual, Edwad
carpenter, excoriates England for the dubious 'bressings
of empire,.rr
\riting
ster, he.o.rd_rr unequivo_
."lly ,tl
ae her blessings of Empire!
Ireland
fertile, orr.. ,o'p-rp.ro*,1
es in lpndon wasred, her peo_
ffi;H:':,3:xi.,;
duced by rhe press *h.11,0,,,
l;*#
ny:i;';f;:;il:;
o<acdy a runaMay success.
yet,
quite undaunte
700 copies over seven years, Carpenter co
book until 1902 when a new ediion wrs
press notices. By this time, however, the b
and 'unpatriotic'
critique of the Empire and ''s?'estern
civiliztion .
Evidence of his influence can be found, for instance, in the pages of
Ir?tl the journal
produced by the social Democratic Found"i,
,o
which carpenter gave substantial financial and ideorogi;-;;pr...
94 LEELA GANDHI
Edited by H. M. Hyndman, \illiam Morris arrd
J.
Tylor,
Justice
mun-
tained a systematic attack on British imperialism, asserting full pariry
between the cause of workers at home and that of colonized
'races'
abroad. And, in an extraordinarily polemicd aticle, 'Shall W'e Fight for
India?'published as early as 18'85 (well before Indian nationalism devel-
oped a coherent agenda), Hyndman called categorically for the cssetion
of the Empire in India:
'I
do say here, however, unavailingl that for the
sake of England ard of India, I would fa rather that we were driven right
out of the country than that we should continue the miserable rule which
has disgraced us and injured the people for the last eight and nventy
years; and I can only hope that not only Socialists but all working
Englishmen will look carefirlly into the facts.'r3 Carpenter also helped to
inform a simila set of disparate affiliations in the activities of the
Humanitaian League. Begun in 1891, with his suPPort, to improve the
treatment of aimals, the League substntially expanded its constituenry
ad concerns, drawing workers' movements into the cause of arimal wel-
fare and, simultaneousl asserting continuiry between the struggles for
animal rights and against imperialism.
It is indisputable and intrinsically relevant to the concerns of this
essay that Edward Carpenter was pre-eminent in the marginal culture of
late l9th-century'W'estern anti-imperialism. And, in pan, t}re ensuing
discussion will bear historical testimony to his influence. Rather more
specifically, however, my project acquires shape at the curious and
emphatic conjunction of homosexualiry and anti-imperialism in
Carpentert work and thought. Everywhere in his extensive oeuvre he
stubbornly extols the exerience and condition of homosexuality as the
cornucopian source of his ethicd and political capacity; as the privileged
reheasal ground for his strange affinities with foreigners, outcastes, out-
siders. Reading Carpenter with any degree of biographical fidelity thus
we are obliged to consider the proposition
(as this essay will do) that,
however incidentally and inscrutabl
''Sl'estern
homosexuality might be
secreted somewhere within the culturally complicated genetic struc.lre
of anti-colonial thought. But what if we reverse this schema and, follow-
ing Carpenter's hyperbolic intent, ask the following: can a c:rse be made
for anti-colonialism
(or a critique of
'W'estern
civilization) as a affective
determinant of the homosexual condition?la Did the libidinal economy
of late l9th-century homosexuality traverse, equall the incongruous
circuits of cross-cultural affinity and same-sex desire? If the figure of the
homosexual, la Carpenter, is constitutively ati-colonial, on what basis
can we accommodate him within a history of sexualiry? How might we
give him a corporeal habitation and a sexual name? Or, to bring these
themes into sharper focus, my overarching query in this essay is, quite
RADICAL KINSHIP 95
simply, to aslc what
in Carpentert
late-Victorian homos
him to call, in
an ardcle written for
e
.ruin
. . . the
?15'$7hy, in other words, could his
only speak its polemical name in
mony?
-
In rhe ensuing pages it will be my claim that carpenter's anti-\estern
polemic, and his amending affinities with Europe's subect races, can only
be explained in terms of a homosexual politics *hor. distinciveness
or caTe into being, at the ourer margins of 'civilized'
or intelligible social-
ity and in the company of a crowd of outcasts and outsiders Jhor. ,ro--
,4. SEXUAI POLITICS
96 LEELA GANDHI
orientation. Thus, Lawrence Housman, the homosexual rights cam-
paigner and younger brother of the poet A. E. Housman, observed in
Carpenter's ethicl eclecticism a sort of guilty, and ultimate uncon-
scionable, cloaking of homosexual designs. Cerpenter, Housman insists
in his contribution to Gilbert Beith's Edward Carpmter. An
preciation,
tragically under-utilized his political platform: '. . . his public utterances
on behalf of certain underdogs----especially on behalf of homosexuals-
his manner of speaking often struck me as too indirect and evasive for his
pleading to redly get home . . . his claim for right of way was too much
hedged in by an appeal to extenuating circumstances.'16
The burden of verdicts such as these was not in any way mitigated
by Carpentert strangely coy iterations of (homo)asexuality; his awftvad
insistence, for example, that 'I had never to do with actual paedestry, so
called . . . My chief desire in love is bodily nearness or contact, as to sleep
naked with a naked friend.'t7 In contexr, E. M. Forstert posthumously
published Maurice (1971),
with its unembarassed espousal of same-sex
sex, is available to reading as a riposte to Carpenter's (often prescriptive)
eclipsing of sensuality. Conceived and completedin 1914, as Forster tells
us, after a visit to the Carpenter ashram/household in Millthorpe,
Maurice inaugurates a new and recognizable era of homosexual defiace
in its Lawrentian tale of a sexually liberatory affair between the class-
privileged Maurice and a common gamekeeper. Determined to contro-
vert, through its unapologetic defence of 'lust', the common superstition
that the sole excuse for any relationship beneen men is that it remain
purely platonic',ts Forster's, novel retains at the edges some portion of
Carpenter's utopian inclusiveness. The difference is that this time round
any extra-sa(ual ethical imperative-for example, Maurice's heroic deter-
mination to 'live ouside class, without relations or money'tl---asnstitutes
a subclause to the compelling specificity of sq(-acts and the choices that
attend them. In shoft, contra Carpente Maurice puts the seir back into
homosexuality and, in so doing, foregrounds the righa of sexuality as the
originary posnrlate of a homoso<ual politics.
Forster's initiative, if we might call it that, has been comprehensively
amplified within much recent gay and lesbian scholarship. So, for
instance, Gayle Rubint influential essay, 'Thinking So<', is especially
notable for its reprehension of tex-negativity in all its variana, right-wing
or radically feminist. Impatient with the pretensions of sexual serious-
sss-ths obligation always to fabricate a metaphysical alibi fs 5s-
Rubin disinvests sex-acts of moral significance so as to create a hospitable
social space for sexual alterity. The claims of sexual pleasure, her argu-
ment implies, supply adequate justification for the facts of se:<ual deviaacy.
Or, to put this different sexual minorities must demand their rehabili-
RADICAL KINSHIP 97
tarion within the social fabric, unapologetically,
as sexed crearures. In
such a*s of uncompromising
selsexudition
we might rearn finary,to
recognise the political dimension of erotic life,.zo
_
Rubin's position gains support in Leo Bersani's recenr demand for a
radicl respecification
of homosexual sex-acts. Imprecating alr homosex-
ud politics that seems ashamed of homosexual esire, Brsanit Homos
charges (homo)asexuality
with the suicidal firrfilment of the invisibility
that a hetero-ized sociality wishes upon its
erverts'.
For, ," Bersani
reminds us in salutary vein, the disti
mosexual
identity are vesred in the ::
'...pr.f.r.ncesdoexist
.fl:i"i:i
' '
and lesbians-pace
'$ittig--do
'associate,
make rove, rive with
affi rmative, or politically effective
ing gay has certain consequences,
ces with other oppressed groups.
among oppressed groups: re
g punished for it'.zr Same_sex
is for homosexual exceptionalism
showing and telling in a world
lendessly against the hope of liv_
In the face of the compelling case for sexual specificity proposed by
pro-sex gay end lesbia scholars/activisrs,
we
"t
l.ft *ith'thr.. ways in
entert sexual evasiveness. First, a
olr us to credit him, as Housman
pite his so<ual equiv-
signifi caace-agreatandhopefi
rrrevorution..-o.ilil::?'.
etest revolutionaies ever known, lived to see the beginning of it; a begin-
ning which, without his help, might not have b..., ir..rrr"ible,.zz
Second,
following Monique's7inig
and Eve sedgwick-in an
".g'-*r
rlr."dy
rtert euphemizaton
of sexuality
ating the important shift from a
cs: from one which enables the
ct minority ro one that discloses
homo/heterosexual
defi nition as/at_the epistemorogicar core of everyday
locialiry
As Sedgwick explains: following th. ,rro.rrr.ement
J,n",
l9th-century
schema (which
we wi[ .*.tiirr. in greater detair below)
wherein a global homo/heterosexualiza
ministic gender binarization
any 'space
in . culture
homo/heterosexual
defi nition
98 LEELA GANDHI
'even
the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence'.25 So, we
might argue, somewhat megalomaniacally, all politics is sexual politics
and Carpenter, accordingly, was talking sex even when he was talking
anti-imperialism.'We will concur in large pan with the impulse behind
this conclusion. But first let us at least eptertain the prospect of rehabil-
itating Carpenter without wading the fact of his sexual wasiveness; con-
sider, however tentatively, his se:<ual evasions as a condition of possibility
for another occluded politics of homosexud exceptionalism. To bear any
weight, this project will have to be amplified within the historical field of
l9th-century sexolory and its effect upon the emergence of homosexual
identity as we now know it. This I do extensively elsewhere. For the
remainder of this section, though,
,let
us elaborate our third 'defence of
Carpentert socud evasions across the theoreticel terrain liberated by the
contentious first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality.
In a thesis which notoriously disqualifia sex itself from the aetiology
of resistance, Foucault, it will be rer.nembered, refr:ses to credit
ower'
as
an agenqF of ser<ual repression, as a force invested only with the preroga-
tives of refi,xal. ''We mtut,' he writes, bandon the hypothesis that modern
industrial societies uhered in an era of increased so<ual repression.'26 For,
the most cursory review of the compad between modemity and sexuality
reveals in the place of sexual prohibition the scendal of a authorized
'dis-
cursive explosion of sexualities. Looking to find a moralizing incentive in
the prudish soul of Victorian governmentality, we are confronted with the
reverse: '. . . the multiplication of discouses concerning sex in the field of
er(ercise of power itself: ar institutional incitement to speak about it, and
to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of
power to hea it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit
aticulation arrd endlessly accumulated detail.'zz How can we make sense
of this anomaly? By apprehending soc, Foucault suggests, as the means of
extending the cartographic purview of power; such that it becomes a thing
not merely to judge but to administer and manage; a path of access into
the covert enclaves of psychic and corporeal life, facilitating'the encroach-
ment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures'.28
\ithin Foucault's schema the perverse 'sex-act', indeed sexuality
itself, changes its colours of revolution for those of recrealcy. Far from
occupying an autonomous and libratory'exteriority' in relation to
Po\Mer,
sex/perversion is now shown to be constituted and produced by the very
apparanrs it seels, in vain, to counter. Thus, every 'speaking' or
er-
formance' of sex is suscepdble to the risls of collaboration, to the charge
of extending the prurient am(s) of power:
'Pleasure
spread to the
Power
that haried it; power anchored the pleasure it uncovered.'2e
r
RADICAL KINSHIP 99
asks in '\J7hat
is Enlightenmenr?': 'How
can the growth of capabilities be
disconnected fom the intensification of power ielations?'32 i{i,
"rrr*.r,
in this essa is to underwrite as resistance the bent for 'invendveness'
ycreted
within a truly counrer-modern aesrhetic imagination. Finding in
Baudelaire a' exemplary instance of such 'inventiveness',
Foucault hints,
tantalizingl at forms of resistance which may well elude the power of
power to reproduce imelf, In his words: 'Modern
man, for BauJehire, is
not tre man who goes offto discover himself, his secrers ad his hidden
truth; he is the man who tries to invent himselfl This modernity does not
"liberate
man in his own being'; it compels him to face the task of pro-
ducing himself,':3
1OO LEELA GANDHI
But how, we might ask with reference to the concerns of this discus-
sion, does this romantic aestheticization of resistance uanslate into the dis-
cursive field of sexuality? Suipped as he is of the insurectionary force of
sex/speech acts, how can the homosexual perform, like a Baudelaire or even
a Sir Philip Sidney, such poetic inventiveness as might bring forth anew
things as never vere either in nature br in culture? To put this differendy,
which feature of homosexuality, if not sex, could comprise that 'locus of
inuactability which, in
Judith
Buder's terminology, might breach the pos-
sibilities of imaginable and realisable . . . configurations within cultue?'34
Some answers are given by Foucault himself in the course of a frec-
tious interview conducted at his apartment in Pais in March 1982.
Throughout the interview Foucault is at pains to demystifr the revolu-
tionary potential of homosexual sex on the grounds that 'what most
bothers those who are not gay about gayness is the gay life-style, not sex
acts themselves'.5 lJnder re heading 'lifesryle', and with chaacteristic
semirntic idiosyncras Foucault lists all those forms of g y relationality,
compelled la Baudelaire, to produce themselves in the absence of estab-
lished codes or guidelines. The unsettling power of homosexual resist-
ance, its radicd inventiveness, he suggests, may well accrue 'from the
prospect that gays will create as yet unforeseen kinds of relationships rJrat
marty people will not tolerate'.36 Unlike the perverse sex-act, then, the
creative intolerabiliry of gay relationality eludes the reproductive intensi-
ty of power by manifesting itself as an anomalous and unprecedented
homosexual effect upon the scene of reryday sociality. In these terms,
gay relationality works against power through its postulation of hew life-
styles not resembling those that have been institutionalised'.37
Foucault's predictions in this interview implicidy obtain from his
account, n The Hisnry of Suality, of the frequendy overlooked symbiotic
relationship between sexuality and qystems of alliance. Here he reminds
us that, in the main, so<uality safeguards and delimits imaginable circuits
of sociality by imbuing systems of alliance with a hew tactic of power'.aa
In any society relations of sex produce, sustain and authorize, in their
turn,'a dzployment ofalliance a system of marriage, of fixation and devel-
opment of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions'.3e
Peculiar to moderniry is the family cell, mediating 'the interchange of
alliance and sexuality'o through that set of intersecting filiative axes
which link, cross-wise, the husband-wife and parent-child relation in a
sacramental tableau of normalization. The sex-act, to put it simpl is
inextricably twinned to alliance, socialiry community. Accordingl a
practice of effective homosexual exceptionalism needs to trarsform not
only the modalities of sex but also, and perhaps more importand the
attending modalities of alliance and kinship.<t
RADICAL KINSHIP 101
of affec-
queering
A LITERAIURE OF INVERSION
History of Sexuality.
102 LEELA GANDHI
is inescapably politicized in and as an existential obligation to break with
the prevailing socid contract by destroying the sociologicd reality ofthe
sexes:46 'If we as lesbiars and gay men, continue to speak of ourselves,
and to conceive of ourselves as women and as men,
rffe
are instrumental
in maintaining heterosex uality.'
at
By imagining homosexuality as a thlrd position outside the binary of
sex, and thereby outside the social conrract itself, \7inig secures a pow-
erfi.rlly utopian provenance for the business of homosexual selidentifi-
cation48 and one that demads, ar irs heart, a radicd reformulation of
relationaliry. The act of withholding consent to the categories of sex, she
insists, is always accompanied by the fomenting of Voluntary associa-
tions' with a range of other 'fugitives'.al For if, as \7lttig suggesrs, rhe
'straight mind' is susceptible to the wider inequities nourished by binary
thinking-for example, the paradigm to which female, dak, bad, unresr
belong, augmented by slave, other, differe-s the 'bent mind' is, or
ought to be in some green Blakean world, constitutively exempq from,
arrd innately critical of these suscepdbilities. Furthermore, ro borrow
some words from Buder, it is precisely because the 'totality' of
'S7inigt
homosexual utopia 'is permanently deferred, never frrlly what it is at any
given juncture in time', that it also possesses the capacity for 'open coali-
tion . . . an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and
divergences'.:o
'Wittig's
polemic arguably finds a Foucauldian resonance in its
emphasis upon homosexualiry as a form of revolutionary 'associatiori.
The links between the two theorists ae further augmented in't7ttigk
insistence that homosexualiry is principally an ethico-epistemological
resistace to binary thought and only incidentally a mater of sexual
action and preference. As she notoriously observes: '. it would be
incorrect to say thet lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for
"woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought . . .
lsbias are nor \Momen.'5l \hile Foucault does not enrirely concern
himself with the problemattzation of the sex/gender system, he implicitly
joins with'Sinig in a complementary endeavour--{anvassed ealier in
this discussion-to dissociate homosexual social potential from homosex-
ual sex. Such dissociation, he suggesrs, was once authorized in Greek
antiquity in and as the recommendation to work upon desire/pleasure
through strategies of ethical self-fashioningor askesis.sz In its Foucauldian
incarnation, Greek asesis is not reducible to a seldenying austerity or
even to 'asceticisrn as it is commonly understood. Rather, it is seen to fur-
nish an ethical (and wentually aesthetic) access ro such forms of selmas-
tery----or distancing (of the self) from the (mis)identifying flux of desire-
RADICAL KINSHIP 103
as might enable the homosexual to reconstitute himself nor in seie alone
but in the surprise of relationality. By mastering, ascetically, our impulse
to find the secret truth of our being in our desires we might, Foucault
implies, finally be free ro query 'what sorts of relations can be established,
invented, multiplied, modulated through homosexuality . . . the problem
is not to discover in oneself re truth of one's sex but rather to use, from
now on, one's sexuality to achiwe a multiplicity of types of relation'.:
These theoretical paradigms-for ascericism and against sexual di
ference----come together in rhe period under consideration in the trope of
the 'urningt: a highly euphemistic designation for the homosexual, pop-
ulaized by the maverick German acrivist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
(1825-1895) within a series of extravagant writings under the pseudo-
nym Numa Numantius. Based loosely on passages in Platot Syrnposium,
Ulrich's 'urning owes his genealory to a Socratic discussion where
Pausanias explains that there are rwo types of eros and, concomitand
two Aphrodites. The elder goddess, creared by the god Uranos partheno-
genetically or via ase:<ual reproduction, is cdled Urania; lacking rwo sexes
in her genetic makeup, she presides exclusively over spiritualized same-
sex love. In contrast, the younger or 'common' Aphrodite, born in re
conventional reproductive manner through the joint labours of Zeus ad
Dione, supplies her heterosexual genius ro your everyday cross-sex lovers.
So it is that the urning (that privileged votay of Aphrodite senior) 'is
not a man'54 but rather the member of a 'third-se/,
distinguished both
by its capaciry for exalted loving and deep sympathy with (other) dispos-
sessed minorities. 'Our position,'writes lJlrichs, 'in wery instace is on the
side of the victims . . . whether rhey be Poles, Hanoverias,
Jews,
Carolics . . .'We batde against the arrogance of despotic majorities.'55
It is in Ulrichs that we can identifr_the source for Carpentert homo-
sexual critique of sexual difference and sex. He elaborates this critique, in
the muted prose of Victorian evolutionary psychology, across a range of
texts of whichhis Loue's Coming ofAge (1896) and The Intertnediate Sex
(1908) are the most represenrative. His recoil from the categories of sex
conceives of heteronormativity as a closed masculine economy where
femaleness (or effeminaq) is effaced, repressed, banished from modes of
production and signification. Thus, Loue's Coming ofAgeblanes the late-
Victorian cult of masculinity (sustained, Carpenter argues, through a
didectical relation to femininiry) for a multitude of sins, including impe-
rialism and race prejudice. The pure man, factory-produced by the pub-
lic school sysrem, is fashioned, Carpenter protesrs, to rule India and to
exploit South Africa;56 encouraged by the bad offices of the pure women,
herself 'nisted . . . into a ridiculous mime of fashion and frivolity.:z
104 LEELA GANDHI
Modern civilization, in his view, is diseased with sexual difference and
can only be cured through the therapeutic intervention of intermediate
types' or homosexual physicians.
Drawing on and subverting the rhetoric of eugenics and evolution-
ism, Carpenter projects homosexuals as a possible species who might
improve upon the palpably inadequate temperaments produced by the
prevailing categories of sex. As he argues in.The Intermediate Sex, at some
past period of evolution, the worker-bee was differentiated from rhe rwo
ordinary types of human kind may be emerging,
who will in societies of the future----cven though
their app s confusion and misapprehension. Here
as elsewhere, carpenter's tactical utopianism situates the homosexual
beyond knowledge and so, beyond represenration. But-as with
'sTittig-it
is precise by withholding from homosexuality what Butler
calls the normative telos of definitional closure'5s that he reformulates
the homosexual project as an 'open
coalition, capable of accor4modat-
class and caste, and
t estranged
ranks of societies.'5e
singles out
the homosexual for
doubled or
hybrid nature which enables him to perform and to reveal ro society the
wealth and variety of affectional possibilities which it has within itself'.60
Inverting the judgemens
of evolutionary psychology thus,
carpenter reclaims the homosexual's gender ambiguity as proof of his
exceptionality. Ad he extends this privilege to the sexually undifferenti-
ated 'savage', also relegated to the bottom of Dawint phyletic ladder. In
his Intermediate Types Among Primitiue Folh (1914), he writes of the
prwalence and spiritual valorization of bisexualiry in non-'western cul-
ture, reserving the greatest awe for the
'tendency
to cultivate and honour
hermaphroditism within Hindu mythology: 'Brahm,
in the Hindu
mythology, is often represented as two-sexed . . . Siva, also, the mosr pop-
ula of the Hindu divinities, is originally bi-sexual.'61 Linking the homo-
sexual and the
rimitive'
in a double encomium, Carpenter's srudy
demonstrates the homosexual's sympathetic capacity ro appreciate the
proper significance of
rimitive
intermediacy' while at the same time
praising
rimitive'
cultures for their perspicacious exaltation of sexual
indeterminism. so the tavage' and the'invert' are named as natural allies
and collaborators in a shaed battle against ('w'estern)
categories of sex:
bound to a common cause through uncommon gifts.
RADICAL KINSHIP 105
If Carpenterk homoso<ual exceptionalism relies in part on a eschewal
of sexual difference, it also gains much energy from his insistence that,
unlike the heterosexual, the 'inrermediay'
is unconraminated by the base
chemicals of sexual desire/practice. Issuing a fierce invective against sex,
he appeals continually for the pleasures of 'non-satisfaction',
the need to
ransform grosser passions', the cultivation of 'hardy temperance'
between lovers, the deflection of
hysical
desire'.62 Carpenter is not alone
in this emphasis-most l9th-century pro/homosexual literature is deter-
mined in its espousal of inversion' as a mastery over sex.
John
Addington
Symonds valorizes, albeir hysterically, 'Greek love' for its capacity to
ansform 'into a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour', the 'passion
which grovels in the filth of sensual grossness'.63 Magnus Hirschfeld
insists that 'just as same-sex acts infrequendy point to contrary sexual
feelings, its total lack does not rule them out; to the contrary, its appar-
ent lack can be a sign of especially strong homosexual sensibility. t 5
possible, of course, to read in these prorestations a defensive posrure.
Homosexual behaviour was subjected to greater scrutiny following the
infamorF Labouchere Amendment of the Criminal l-awAmendmentAct
of 1885 which extended the scope of the law to cover all homosexual
acts, public or private. And the increased legal sanctions culminated in the
1895 Osca'S7-rlde trials, radically changing the experience and expression
of homosexuality in
fr"
fu siecle England. The long terror consequenr
upon these trids certainly finds its way into the anxious apologetics of
much contemporary homosexual literature, such as Anomalyt The Inuert
(1927), urging abstinence as part of the struggle ro 'encourage wery
symptom of sexual normdisation in the face of potential blackmail.er
'W'ritten
direcdy after the \ilde case, Carpenter's Loae's Coming of
Age is likely to have been informed by similar feas. But it is not sexual
circumspection that we find in Carpenter so much as aggressive sex-neg-
ativity. Isolating in the so<ual overdevelopment of heterosexual society
the pernicious first cause for 'half-grown narures, Carpenter finds rwo
reasons to recommend his own form of asesis. The first, fashioned as
opprobrium, identifies in sex the basic nutrient for tyranny and the will
to mastery manifest especidly in the oppression of women and as impe-
rialism.
'$Thenever
'sex . . . retains the first place,' he writes, it produces
'men so fatuous that it actually does not hurt them to see the streets
crammed with prostitutes . . . men to whom it seems quite natural that
our marriage ad social institutions should lumber along over the bodies
of women, and our "imperial"
enterprise over the bodies of babaian
races.'66 Second, he argues, the libidinal economy ofheterosex lends itself
to such egregious brutality because it stunts the free development of
affectional possibilities, inlibiting sympathies with the oppressed of the
106 LEELA GANDHI
men we have t}'e love sentiment in one of its most perfect forms-a form
in which from the necessities of the situation the ,.rrr,ro,r, element . . . is
exquisitely subordinated . . .'.Ge carpenterk preferred term for this per-
fected love senriment is 'friendship'
a',d hi elaborates its themes in
So, to summaize this phase of our discussion: standing on the out-
skirts of civilized sociality, the lgth-century homose*.rrl ,rid.rrtood his
tered_ the relational possibilities of the human heat. In this dystopian
world, the 'inverr'
alone was exceptional: a species of the future destined
to correct the inequities of'$l'estern/hereronormativity
through his capac-
RADICAL KINSHIP 107
ity for radical kinship. Liberated from the dull monochrome of sexual
dimorphism, this constitutively doubled and hybrid intermediar)' was
gifted with variegated sympathies and desires. His asceticism, likewise,
equipped him for the complex affiliative demands of friendship. And
here, in a nutshell, we have the raw materials for Carpenter's critique of
'Western
civilization and congruent affnities with Europe's subject races.
That he turned to the East we know from his 1890 odyssey to India and
Ceylon, recorded (with vivid examples of imperial bigotry) in From
Adm's Pea to Elephnta (1892); his lifelong friendship and correspon-
dence with the Sri Lankan P. Aunachalam; his seeking of wisdom from
a Hindu gnani from whom he learnt, among other things, secret tech-
niques for 'the subjection of desire'.72'W'e could easily end our narrative
here, having given an account of Carpentert part in expanding, however
briefl the ideological scope of
'modern
homosexualiry. But what of any
part that modern homosexualiry and the literature of inversion might
have played in the history of anti-colonial thought? To answer this ques-
tion conprehensively we would have to undertake a monumental un-
closeting of history which is entirely beyond the scope of this discussion.
However, we do have access to one very small and revealing story of cul-
tural uaffic. Let me retell it on our way to a conclusion.
In 1889, Carpenter wrote his polemical Ciuilistion; hs Cause and
Cure. Diagnosing imperial Europe as perilously diseased with 'civilisa-
tion, Carpenter's book continually asserts the superioriry of so-cdled
'savage'
and 'babaian societies, prescribing a cure for the'W'est in 'a fresh
influx of savagery .,tTh-
resent
competitive society', he claims, 'is more
and more rapidly becoming a mere formula and husk within which the
outlines of a new and human society are already discernible.
Simultaneously and as if to match this growth, a move towads . . .
Savagery is for the first time taking place from within . . .'74 Ciailisation,
as with many of Carpentert writings, elicited a mixed welcome at home.
But, by some coincidence, it fell into the hands of the young M. K.
Gandhi during a four-month visit to London in 1909, where he had
come unsuccessfully to campaign for the rights of South Africat Indian
minorities. On the voyage back to South Africa, bitter disillusioned
with his unfavourable reception in England, he penned Hind Swamj
(1910): a 30,000 wordsJong scathing critique of W'estern civilization,
written orrer an unbroken 10-day stretch, somedmes with his right hand
and sometimes with the left (demonstrating, we might note, the
ambidexterity often associated in both'Western and Eastern cultural psy-
chology with bisexual temperaments). Condemning, in no uncertain
terms, the British presence in India, this early work clear announces the
Gandhian demand for suraj or selrule; the techniques of non-cooper-
.I08
LEELA GANDHI
H^TdI evidence to givl carpenter pride of place at the formative origins
of India anti-colonialism-but
enough rqnore his welcomed presence
at ttrese origins.
economy requires ad condones repetitive acts of violence upon the nat-
urally nonconsenting
bodies of women. In his words,
.yo,rrrg
men in
India . . . ae maried early . . . nobody tells them to exercise rtraint in
maried
lf:
. . .The poorgirl wives are expected by their surroundings
to bea childen as fast as they can.'80
RADICAL KINSHIP 109
ects are indistinguishable after all. \Vhat we have, either way, are grounds
for sympathy, collaboration and kinship across multiple registers: a friend-
ship of sorts between an Indian anti-colonial revolutionary and an English
homoserual polemicist. Acknowledging these complo< shaed circuits, the
animal rights activist Henry Salt took cue to write to Gandhi at the end of
1929, the year that Edwad Carpenter died. All good causes,' Salt report-
ed, 'have suffered a loss this yar by the death of Edwad Carpenter.'at
CODA
But Edwad Carpenter
'died', of course, well before 1929, his politics
helped into a shallow grave by the eager ministrations of Sigmund Freud.
Albeit inadvertent Freud arguably dismantled the complicated edifice
of homosexual exceptionalism in roughly three ways. First, and to most
effect, by postulating homosexuality es ari originary and universal condi-
tion, he categoricdly denied the 'third-sei position which had placed the
homosexual outside the fixed binary of heterosexual difference. In his
words; 'Psychoanalytic reseach is most decidedly opposed to any attemPt
at separating off homosexuals from the rest of makind as a group of a
special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that ae
manifesdy displayed it is found that all huma beings are capable of mak-
ing a homosexual object-choice and have, in fact, made one in their
unconscious . . . psychoanalysis considers rhat a choice ofan object inde-
pendendy of its sex-freedom to range equally over male and female
objects-as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and
early periods of history is the original basis from which, as a result of
restriction in one direction or the otJer, both the normal and the invert-
ed types develop.az
In other words, the homosexual could no longer lay claim to onto-
logical exceptionality and its relational effects. Nor for that matter would
he be allowed to amplify (associational) forms of existential exceptional-
ism through his conscientious objections to sex. For, and second, through
his relendess pathologization of all sexual inhibition, Freud interupted
the discursive logic of the homosexual recoil from sex by diagnosing as
illness such forms of (homo)asexuality as Carpenter and Symonds pro-
pounded. Thus, while writing with apparent lack of moral judgement-
indeed, with deliberate compassio-es homosexual sex, Freud ren-
ders, for example, Leonado da Vincit alleged
(homo)asexuality into a
symptom of ill-health. The artistt 'cool repudiation of sexuality', his
'chaste
. . . even absdnent' lifestyle, his privileging ofwork over sex,
lace
hirn, Freud observes, 'close to the type of neurotic that we describe as
"obsessional"; aod we may compare his researches to the "obsessive
brooding'of neurotics, ard his inhibitions to what are known as their
.I1O
LEELA GANDHI
"abulias"''s3
He
-explains le:ros
as a pathology
pecuriar to the repres-
sion or denial of aberrant drives:
-ptrrr,
"r.Tor_.d
i'p*
"i
. .or.
of abnormal sexudity; neuroses are . .
-
Fa om being the prelude
refirsal of sex (straight
or gay) was
psychological
disease. Third, and
homose<ual
condition,
we note Freu
to any adversaial elationship
with
profound psychic cosrs enrziled by
ungratefirl to demand its abolition.s
tic withdawal
as delusionar
flights from trre rear, he claims that
.whoever
.
;-^ii _:
.
TP.i
this path. . . will as a nle attain notling.ru
Arrd so, rJre
nomosexuar
and the sayage were denied recourse to that .rr-o' gro'nd
for their negative community
at the liminar outskins of
,vestern
hetero-
normative
civility. In rerurn fo th rifices the t r_"r*"J,'"t*
access to the rich consoladons
Freudian gifts were, i
invention
as collateral
the cost, we could sa
Notes
This is a version of a chapter dtled
.Sexr
The Story of Late Victorian
Y"T.:.*:4
Exceptionalism
in Leela Gandhi, Aifectiue C"_;;;;;;r,
!!-!":*!_Tlougbt,
Fin_d_Siecl
Rzdicalism,"2r
rt, ioiiill*rf
Frindship (Durham:
Duke University
press,
2006), pp. Z,+<Z'."""*'
,
I ClaudeSummers (ed.),
The andLesbianLiterary
HerigeARedd,s
companion to The writas a.
-'heir
\vorks
fom
Antiqairy to the
present
(New
York Henry Holr and Company, 199t5), p. 664.
2 lbid.
3 Ruth vanita and Sareem Kidwai (eds),
same-s Loue in India: Radins
from
Literanre and History
Newyo. s. M;"t;.r.,'r,iK.
4
RADICAL KINSHIP 111
civilisation. They do not. All they represent, like most other sets of con-
ventions, is a locdised cultural perception (or some may think misper-
ception) and, in particular, a puritanical code politically aauned to the
supposed needs of ruling a world-wide empire with aloof if benevolent
dignity (p.215).
5 Monique Vinig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1992).
6
'Winigt
words: 'For the category of sex is a totalitaian one . . . we must
destroy it and stat thinking beyond it if we want to start thinking at all,
as /e must destroy t}re sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to
exist' (ibid., p. 8).
7 Consider, for example, the following qualification:
'The
category of sex
is r}re one that rules as "naturel" the relation that is at the base of (het-
eroso<ual) society and through which half of the population, women, are
"heterosexualised" . . . and submimed to a heterosexual economy' (ibid.,
p. 6). Buder objeca to the paranoid allegations of 'global phallogocen-
trisrn which mak much'\?'estern feminist thought 'Feminist critique
ought to explore the totalising claims of a masculinist signifring econo-
m but also remain self-critical with respect to the totdising gesrures of
feminism. The effort to identifr the enemy as singular in form is a
rwerse-discourse that uncritically mimics the strategies of the oppressor
instead of offering a different set of terms'-Judith Buler, Gendr
Tioabl: Ferninisrn and the Sabuersion of ldzntity (New York/London:
Roudedge, 1990), p. 13. Vhile this critique is salutory Butler posits an
unnecessary homology between 'men and masculinity. Indeed, in ia
inventive exploration of the assymetrical relations of se<, gender and
desire, queer tleory ought to allow for the possibiliry of a male eschew-
al of masculiniry or, in reverse, a masculinist repression not only of
'women but also of
'womanliness'/'effeminacy' within men. The plural-
iry of such oppositions eludes mere reversal within the xed identifying
signs of a binary system.
8 Cf. also Marjorie Gabert notion in Wsted Interests: Cross-Dressing and
CalnralAnxiety
(Hamondwonh: Penguin, 1993), of the third space of
the uanwestite which questions binary thinking and introduces crisis'
(p. l l). I am indebted to Brian Flanagan for drawing my attention to this
example, as also for his provocative discussion of heteronormativiry and
radical drag in 'Refuhioning the "straight-Jacket":
Queer
Gender
Performances in Heteropatriarchyt Satorial Prison. Laterl- Available at
www. latrobe.edu. aulwwdenglish/lateral.html
9 See, for e:<ample, Ashis Nandy The Intimte Enemln Loss and Recouery of
Self Under Colonialism
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983);
Mrinalini SiI:., Colpnial Mscaliniryr The'Man Englishnzn' and tbe
'Efemina Bengali in the l^ate Nineteenth Cennry
(Manchester/New
York Manchester fJniversiry Press, t995); Saa Seri, The Rhenric of
English Indi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rwathi
112 LEELA GANDHI
ll Edwad Carpenrer, Tirutards DemoctaE (lgg3;
reprint, london: GMp,
1985), p.373.
12Ibid., pp.37T4.
13 H. M. Hyndman, 'Shall \e
Fight for Ind,
Justice, Mach lgg5: 4.
t4 Though not stricdy interchangeable, and-impeiiarism
and the critique of
'w'estern
civilization ae inextricable in carplnter's thoughr arrd th"t of
his contemporaries.
15 Edwad Carpenter, 'Empire
in India and Elsewhere', Humane Reaieu, I
(1900):
207; emphasis in original.
16In Gilben Beith, Edwdrd Clqentn An Appreciatioz (London:,George
Allen & Unwin, l93t), p. ilO.
17
British
l8
5O-2.
2000),
l9lbid., p.208.
20
tics
M.
on:
2l l-eo Bersani, Homos (cambridge,
rrR: Havad universiry
press,
1995),
pp. 59,61,67.
22 Housman, in Beith, Eduard Carpenter,p. l l l.
RADICAL KINSHIP 1 13
,ho"gh homosexudiry is the theme of the book. Banes's oeuvre is an
imponant literary oeuvre even .ho"gh her major theme is lesbianism . . .
the work of these writers has transformed, as should all important work,
the to<tual dssue of ou times.'
24 Sedgwick, Epi*enologlt of the Clnset, p.2.
25rbi'
26 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexaal I: An Intoduction, Robett
Hurley (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p.49.
27lbi,., p. 18. Emphasis in original.
28 Ibid., p. 48.
29Ibid., p.45.
30 Slavoj ZiztL, fttt Tictish Subjecx The Absent Cenne of Politicl Ontologlr
(London/New York Verso, 1999), p. 256.
31 Foucault, Hknry of Sexaal 1, p. 101.
32 Michel Foucault,
.\hat
is Enlightenment', in Paul Rabinow (ed")' The
Focaub Readzn An Introdaction to Focaulls Thought (Hatmondsworth:
Penguin, l99l),p.48.
33lbid,., p.42.
34 Buder, Gendn Tiouble, p. 9.
35
James
O'Higgins,
'sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interviewwith Michel
Foucault', in Slmagundi (Fall 1 982-\7nter I 983), 58-59: 22.
36lbid.
37 rbid.
38 Foucault, History of Sexaal /, p. 108.
39Ibid., p. 106.
40lbid., p. 108.
4l Foucaultt philosophical preference for a politics ofgay relationality over
the politics of gay sex-acts is comprehensively discussed in David M.
Halperin, Saint Foacaulx Totpards Gay Hagiograpfu (Oxford:- Oxford
University Press, 1995), pp. 15-125.
42 Foucault, History of Sexuali.ty I, p.96.
43 Edwar,Carpente Loue's Coming ofAge A Series ofPapers on the Reltion
of the Sexes (1896; reprint, London: George Allen & IJnwin, 1948), p.
1 81 . In attempting to prepare the theoretical ground for a rehabilitation
of Edwad Carpenter and his kind, I have set up a somewhat polemiel
opposition beneen pro-sex and pro-relationaliry gey and lesbian theo-
risa. The oppositions are not always so stak, nor am I proposing a puri-
tanicd assault on sex-acts ad their complex pleasures. Recend queer
theory in all its vaiana has generally come to concur with the
Fouceuldian emphasis on reimagining communiry either through or
witlout the accompanying performance of sex. For example, Leo
Bersani's Homos seefts in its enthusiastic exploration of 'gy desire' a rad-
114 LEELA GANDHI
icl 'redefinidon
of socialiry'(p. 7). And while insisting that'queers' do
nor wanr just se:<', Michael \aner inaugurates the anthology Fear of
Queer
Nation:
Queer
Politics and socil Theory (Minneapolis/Lorrdon:
universiry of Minnesota Press, 1993), with a declaation of resistance
against heterosexual culturet privileging of itself, 'as the elemental form
of associatiori (p. ,oi). In the end, my proposed exploration of the poli-
tics exemplified by carpenter gains its cue from queer trreoryt generic
turn rowad issues of communiry association, kins[ip, radrer tha its
turn away from the performance of homo-sex.
44rnhis 1982 interview, Foucauh refixes to answer this question on the
grounds that'Ifthe relationships to be created rt
",
y.i unforeseeable,
then we cant really say trat this fearue or that fearue wiil be denied . . .'
(O' Higgins, 'Sexual
Choice, Sexual Acr', p.22).
45 vtrig; The straigbt Min, pp.5,40. Her dresis has been notably'updated'
b among otlers, Butler in Gendr Toubl:.The institutiorr'of
"
.o*_
pulsory ard naturalised heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as
a binary relation in which the masculine term is differendated from a
feminine term, and this differendation is accomplished through the prac-
tice of heterosexual desire. The act of differendting the .*o pppriiorr-
al moments of the binary resulrc in the consolidarion of eachterm, the
respective internd coherence ofsex, gender, desire, (pp. 22_3).'
46 In
rJ7ittigt
words, 'For
the category of sex is a totalitaian one . . . we
must destroy it and start thinking beyond it if we wnr ro start thinking
at all, as we musr destroy the sexes as a sociological realiry if we want to
sran ro enst' (Straight
Mind, p.8).
47 r6id.,30.
48 See also Gaber's notion, in vested rnturests, of the rhird space of rre tras-
rrcstite, which questions binary thinking and inuoduces crisis' (p. I l).
49 See \7ttig, strat Mind:'. . . breaking offthe heterosexuar social con-
rract is a necessiry for those who do not consent to it. For if there is some-
thing real in the ideas of Rousseau, it is that we cer form "voluntary
asso-
ciations" here and now, and . . . reformulate the social contract as a ne\M
one, although re re not princes or legislators. Is ris a mere utopia?
Then I will stay with socrates's view and also Glaucon's: If ultimarely we
ae denied a new social order, which therefore can exist onry in words, I
will find it in myself'
.
a.
50 Buder, Gndr Tiouble, p. 16.
5l Vinig, Strt Mind, p. 32.
52 see Michel Foucault, The History of sexuztity II: The
(Jses
of
plzsure
(Penguin:
Hamondsworth, 1987), pp. 72J.
53 Cited in Halperin, Saint Foucah, p.78.
54KarI Heinrich tllrichs, The Riddh of'Man-Manly' Loue The
pioneering
Vl'or on Malz Homosexuality, Michael A. lombardi-Nash (uans.), )
vors (Buffalo/New
York Prometheus Books, 1994), vor. l, p. 36.
RADICAL KINSHIP 1 15
55 lbid., voL.2, p.547.
56 Carpente Lou s Corning ofAge, pp. 54-5.
57Ibrd.., p.61.
58 Butler, Gendr Tioublz, p. 16.
59 Edwad Carpenter, The Intermediate Sen A Sndl of Some Tiansitionl
pes
ofMen ndW'omen (London: S. Sonnenschein E Co., 1908)' pp.
tr4-5.
60 Carpenter, Lous Coming ofAge, p. 181. Tiue to the ethicl inducements
of homosexualiry as he saw it, Carpenter's own sympathies were consis-
tently expansive and inclusive. In addition to his vehement anti-imperi-
alism, he endeavoured-dtrough a
'$hitmanic
rhetoric of democratic
comradeship-to draw the workei into the campaign against public-
school masculiniry. Likewise, convinced of a natural afinity between
women and homosexuals, he combined forces with the
'\J(i'oment
Freedom League, formed in 1908, to further the cause of the suffrage
campaign. Active with Henry SaIt in the animal rights movement,
Carpenter was also notable as a passionate anti-vivisectionist and advo-
cate for the establishment of animal sanctuaies. Carpenter et al.t rejec-
tion ofsexual binaism as the prerequisite for radical/inclusive/utopian
communiry was taken up in the early years of the 20th century by the
editors of the pro-homose:<ual journd Urania (19L540). Declaring
their aim to abolish all disdnctions of sex and gender, each issue
announced the following utopian project, 'Urania denotes te company
of those who ae firmly determined to ignore the dual organisation of
humanity in all its manifestations. They ae convinced that this dualiry
has resulted in the formation of two warped and imperfect types; and
that in order to get rid of this state of things no measure of "emancipa-
tion" or "equality' will suffice, which do not begin with a complete
refixal to recognise or tolerate the dualiry itself.'
61 Edwad Carpenter, Intentediate
pes
Among Primitiue Folh A Sndy in
Social Euolutioz (London: George Allen Ec Unwin, l9l4)' pp.7l-2,82.
62 Carpenter, Lou s Coming of Age, pp. 16, 17 , 19 , 2l .
63J. L Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics', in Malz Loue A Prob[rrn in
Gree Ethics nd Other'W:ritings
(New York Pagan Boola, 1983), p. 52.
64 Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexual of Men and-Wonen, Michael A.
Lombardi-Nash
(trans.) (1914; reprint, New York: Prometheus Bools,
2000), p. r14.
65 Anomal The Inuert and His Social Adju^snnent (I-ondon: Baillire, Tin'lall
& Cox, 1927), p. t37.
66 Carpenter, Lou s Coming ofAge, pp. 55, 56.
67Ibid., p. 106.
68 Ibid., pp.95, 122, 164, 174.
69lbid., p.145.
1 16 LEELA GANDHI
70 Edward Carpenter, Ioktn An Anthologt of Friendship (London:
Swan
Sonnenschein, 1902), pp. 177-g.
71 Symonds, A Problem in Modem Ethics, (l g9O,
in Malz Loue,pp. 99, 101.
728wad Carpenter, From Adm,s
pe
to Elephanta: Set ha-;n Ceytan
and Indi (1892:
reprint, London: George len ec Unwin, l9Z, p.
t74.
73 Edwad Carpenrer, Ciailisation: Its Caase and Cure and Other Essays
(1889;
reprint, lndon: Swan Sonnenschein, l9l0)s p.47.
74Ibid., p.49.
75M. K. Gadhi, Hilzd Swaraj and Other Vitings (1910;
reprint,
Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry
press,
1997), p.32.
76 Carpenter, Ciailisation, p. 105.
77 See Nand The Intimate Eneny.
78The axious ati-colonial recuperarion of a lost native masculiniry is
attested, for instance, in Swami Vivekanadt claim thar the salvatioi of
Hindus depended on dre three Bt, beef, biceps and Bhagavadgita, and
Nathuram Godset assassination of Maharma Gadhi i'
_e
,rlm. of
" 'remasculated'
Hindu poliry. A substantial .,rtmenr of masculine anxi-
edes in nationalist India may be found in
Revarhi lGishnaswam Efeminism: Tbe
(Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan
press,
l99g) and Teltscher,
'"Maidenly
and
Iell
Nigh Effeminar",.
79 M. K Gandhi, cited in ved Mehta, Mahatrna Gndhi and hi
osttes
([ondon:
Deutsch, 1977), pp. lgl,192.
80 M. K. Gandhi, Self-Restraint uersus Self_Indaence (Ahmedabad:
Navjivan, 1928), p. 105.
8l Henry Salt ro M. K. Gandhi, 2 December, 1929, in George Hendick
and
\illene
Hendick (eds),
Tbe saaoar of satt A Henry st,en*otog,
(Fonwell,
Sussex: Centaur
press,
l9g9),
f.
VS.
82 Sigmund Freu' On Sexuality, The
pelican
Freud Library, Angela
Richads (ed.) (Harmondswonh: pelicr
Bools, 1977), pp.SiSZ"i.
83 Sigmund Freud, 'Ionado
Da vinci and a Memory of His childhood'
(1910),
in Fiue Lecfires on
psycboanasis:
Leonrdo d wnci and otber
ndrd Edition of the Compbte
psycholgical
Vork of
James Srachey (n. ed.) (i,ondorrtl.'H"gar,h pr*;,
p. l3t.
84 Freud, On Senal, p.80.
85 See Sigmund Freud, The Funre of an Illusion, Ciuilisation and ix
Discontents and Othet Vors, The &andrd Edition of the Comphte
cbological
Vors of Sigmund Freud,
JamesStrachey 1g.". .a.
G,o.o.r,
The Hogarth Press, l92l-27),vot.2l,
p. 15.
86 sigmund Freu', ciailisation and ix Discontmts,James
strachey (trans.)
(london: ll\ll
Nonon and Co., l9S9), p. 31.
QUEERING
CULTURE STUDIES: NOTES TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK
Pramod K. Nayar
Cultural Studies-a curious and violently irascible mixture of disci-
plines-has produced extraordinarily powerfirl cultural critiques since
the 1980s. Cultural Studies as an amorphous discipline shaes theoretical
assumptions and methods from several forms of contemporary cultural
critique: from post-structuralist thought to feminism to minority dis-
course. Thus in India, the work of Madhava Prasad (films), Susie Thau
and Tejaswini Niranjana (gender, pedagogy, modernity), Patricia tlberoi
and Kajri
Jain
(visual arts), Arvind R{"gop"l (television) ad several oth-
ers writing in the 1980s and 1990s have effectively harnessed a range of
theories in order to intepret and interrogate cultural phenomena. This
essay seel,c to suggest a set of notes that indicate a framework for queer-
ingCultaral Studies.
Cultural Studies is a heterogeneous set of practices concerned with
the politics of culture. Here is a set of questions for Cultural Studies:
-Vhose
culture shall be the official one and whose shall be subordinat-
ed?
rVhat
cultures shall be regarded as wonhy of display and which
shall be hidden?'S7hose history shall be remembered and whose ma-
ginalizrd?. . . This is the realm of cultural polidcs (Jordan and V'eedon
1995:4).
Jordan
and
tVeedon
define cultural politics as 'the struggle to fix
meaaings in the interest of particular groups' (544). Cultural Studies is
interested in the process by which po\ er relations between and within
groups of huma beings organize codes of cultu-fsm food habits to
music, scientific discourses to morality-and rnae meaning. !7hen a
community defines and evaluates something as 'good' or 'bad', it has
nothing to do with the immarent quality of the thing/event but is the
astiption of value by the community to the thing/went.
Thus, categories such as gays/lesbians are evaluated as pathologi."lly
wil, deranged, 'abnormal', stricdy within a system of meaning-generation.
Homosexuality is butside the pale' because it has been clnsifed as such.
Its oppression is thus a cultural and political event. Rejected because it is